_Saturday, September 20._--Six weeks to-day since the fight in which we became dead to the world. "Hope springs eternal," etc. If it didn't, how many would turn their faces to the wall! One man got his everlasting furlough the other day, just at supper time; but they pulled the sheet over his face and went on with the bread and molasses; and, when that was over, down he went to the dead-house. This, in my opinion, is for the country the very moment of convulsion and travail, out of which some new state of things,--the commencement of some new era,--for better or for worse, will surely come. "When the pain is sorest, the child is born; and the night is darkest before the dawn of the day of the Lord at hand." But at this critical moment to be walled up alive, where only faint echoes and uncertain sounds from the great fields reach us,--the fields where our fellow-soldiers are playing out the great game of the age is,--a chance of war, and nothing to complain of while we still live. A great battle has been in Maryland, and, although they make it out that we were worsted, yet from signs and tokens we draw our own inferences. First and greatest, the women haven't been up to crow victory over the Yankee prisoners, _ergo_ the first despatch did not announce a success; the doctors have said nothing, and last night Dr. Hay, with a dozen others and all the dressers that could be spared, left for Maryland. Charley, the nigger, yesterday reported that the folks in town felt very bad about it. Reports fly about of fifty thousand killed and wounded on both sides; and, as they can't know ours, theirs must have been tremendous to have started such reports. (Here come the women to the menagerie.) At all events, it's such a victory as they can't stand a repetition of; and now, if the North will pour in reinforcements, there may be a glimmer of daylight for the cause, if not for me. A man has come into this room, wounded at Port Republic, First Sergeant Seventh Ohio, the most awful specimen of emaciation that I ever saw or would have believed consistent with the vital spark. The articulation of each joint, covered only by the tense polished skin, is as distinct as in a skeleton. Another horror: a rebel deserter, who was put in with the Yankees in order to be under guard, has just been sheared, on account of one of the plagues of Egypt; and his head was a sight to dream of, not to tell. He had been living in the woods since he deserted, was immediately taken down with typhoid fever, and I thought wanted to die. The room now consists as follows, beginning with my next neighbor: Corporal James Shipp, known as Jimmy, the pet of the room, doctors and nurses inclusive: a nice, simple-hearted boy of seventeen, brave and good; shot in shoulder, scapula taken out; recovering. Private Smith, Forty-sixth Pennsylvania: good fellow, apparently; has taken laudanum enough to float a ship, and seems to be getting fat on it.